Bits and pieces of things that caught my eye not only for my own interest, but enough to want to share with you, too…

I disappeared again for a bit because I was in writer-sprint-must-finish-this-book mode, which took precedence over the blog,… but I’m back with just a couple links for y’all today:

Writing Stuff:

Whether or not you outline, character sketch, or just jot notes here and there, author Laura Drake offers a fast and easy template for organizing your novel’s plot in Excel. I like it for the at-a-glance birds-eye view of what is happening in your story and might use it for my next book. Or possibly go back and fill it in with info from my current one because I think it could still be really helpful – an alternative to my index cards!

Another author, Jennifer Crusie, offers valuable advice this week in which she answers a question about how to more effectively write character emotion. Crusie says that the best lesson she learned is that emotion lives in the body and that not only do we want to include involuntary physical responses to emotion, but we want to include specific ones that might mean different things from character to character.

Reading Stuff:

Author Shannon Hale gives us this important post about recent school visits she’s made in which administrators have chosen to only invite female students to her author events instead of all students. Why is this? When male authors visit, she says, it is not only male students invited and this sends a damaging message to both genders. Please read her words about this issue, as she conveys the concerns better than I do so here.

Video of the Week:

Leonard Nimoy – most famous for his role of Spock in Star Trek – died yesterday. He did some fun and lighthearted things in the past few years and did not seem to begrudge the inability to fully break away from his Spock persona. In fact, he signed all his tweets with the iconic “LLAP” (Live long and prosper). For me, I will always remember this scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I have never been a full-fledged trekkie for the original series (I’m a TNG girl) and my husband introduced me to the movies after all of them had already made. It was a scene that I did not expect, which is a lovely rarity in film these days, it seems. Many fans shared the famous quote: “I have been, and always shall be, your friend.”